My wife and I have divided our respective energies and specialities between working with the government and working with the insurance companies. If you've read my earlier posts, you'll know I work with the insurance agencies. I think I have the easier job.
"We're in for a fight," my wife said to me tonight.
I won't mention with who or for what. It's enough to know it's part of the process to obtain help for our son that we have to justify and justify and verify and authenticate and evaluate and you name your favorite auditing practice here - you get the idea.
I work in financial services, so I'm no stranger to auditing, but I have to say that the level of stringency for children with disabilities seems like a very high bar. Even from my seat here in the observation deck, it seems like a lot to ask of families who are already under considerable strain just to care for their kids.
"It cost me ten large," a friend of mine once told me when describing the legal bills he had to foot to get his community to stop stonewalling and offer his own son services.
"We had to move," I recall a former neighbor say to my wife when describing how she had to get service for her son.
And when I see what passes for auditing on building projects, or pension funds, or even general schooling, I wonder why families with children with special needs get hit with such a high bar.
Sometimes, I feel like the good kid in school again who gets thrown into detention for some minor infraction while the spitballs fly fast and go unchallenged. I feel like we're easy pickins' for government who can't get it right anywhere else.
In the end, I know we'll manage. I know the laws are on our side and that the intent of the laws are good. I also know that we're lucky to live in a state and a community that at least have such laws on the books - however they may be implemented.
In the end, I know we're a cost. Even though it's far, far cheaper to help my son now that it would be to do it later in life; and even though his care is far, far cheaper than the cost we pay for some perfectly healthy individual who created and sold toxic assets; I know we're a cost.
I just wish my collective state and local government officials would take some of the hurdles in our path and throw them in front of a stadium project, or a school building program, or an already cost the state multi million dollar tunnel project before they decided to cancel it.
I just wish they'd pick on someone more worthy of their mistrust.
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